Autonomous 3D Exploration of Large Structures Using an UAV Equipped with a 2D LIDAR

Autonomous 3D Exploration of Large Structures Using an UAV Equipped with a 2D LIDAR

Blog Article

This paper addressed the challenge of exploring large, unknown, and unstructured industrial environments with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).The resulting system combined well-known components and techniques with a new manoeuvre to use a low-cost 2D laser to measure a 3D structure.Our approach combined frontier-based exploration, the Lazy Theta* path planner, and a flyby sampling manoeuvre to create a 3D map of large scenarios.One of the novelties of our system is that all the algorithms click here relied on the multi-resolution of the octomap for the world representation.We used a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HitL) simulation environment to collect accurate measurements of the capability of the open-source system to run online and on-board click here the UAV in real-time.

Our approach is compared to different reference heuristics under this simulation environment showing better performance in regards to the amount of explored space.With the proposed approach, the UAV is able to explore 93% of the search space under 30 min, generating a path without repetition that adjusts to the occupied space covering indoor locations, irregular structures, and suspended obstacles.